Danny Boyle is a chameleon of a director. He’s never made a remotely similar film in terms of genre, and yet each one is undeniably his own. They can be brutal and visceral throughout and yet find a way to be inspirational and exciting in the end. “127 Hours” is one of Boyle’s greatest challenges and greatest achievements.
Boyle took the story of Aron Ralston, a reckless mountain climber who went deep into Utah and got himself trapped in a crevasse underneath a boulder for 127 hours, and made it an exciting, visually stimulating film. We know Ralston survived because his book “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” serves as the basis for this film. The way he escaped is almost just as much common knowledge, and the buildup to his eventual escape builds a wonderful tension throughout the film. Boyle feeds us small teases of Ralston weighing his options before making that decision, and in an amazingly nauseating climactic scene, he floors us.
Such is the power of the rest of “127 Hours,” which finds ways to be simultaneously adrenaline fueled and heart stopping, intense and desolate or revealing and claustrophobic. Enrique Chediak’s cinematography is the best of the year because he wonderfully blends the handheld queasy cam with the panoramic HD cam to create those dual emotions. Watch some of the early shots inside the cliff’s cracks looking up at Ralston, and notice how as buried as the camera remains, how much it still seems to capture.
Boyle uses all of these tricks to his advantage. Jump cuts, wipes, a techno-tinged score by “Slumdog’s” A.R Rahman and the aforementioned alternating of cameras allow “127 Hours” to fire at all cylinders constantly. Boyle simplifies over five days into 90 minutes, and he makes your blood rush. Yet he still finds a way to make time stand still as Ralston finds himself trapped. Quick, yet lingering shots of Ralston’s watch are agonizing when considering Ralston’s predicament.
And we feel his pain firsthand. Boyle invents new ways to illustrate emotions and feelings like thirst and fear. The obsessive amount of detail in “127 Hours” speaks to what Ralston must have scoured over in devising ways to escape, and it’s more detailed than you can possibly imagine. Some of the most ingenious shots come from inside the water bottle he’s drinking from or worse yet from literally inside his trapped arm. Probably the most cringe inducing moment of brilliance is when Ralston is forced to drink his own urine, and our perspective comes from inside his Camelback as the yellowish liquid rises slowly up until we’re swimming in it.
And for all of Boyle’s magic, James Franco as Ralston is a trooper. This is by far the best performance of his career. He has to match the intensity of Boyle’s direction, and he does so wonderfully, eliciting the most primal of his emotions. Easily his best scene comes when he turns his one-man show into a triple performance. In an attempt to keep his sanity, he recreates a morning news show with himself as host, interviewee and call-in audience member. The scene’s editing provides the perfect framework, but Franco owns it in delivering the emotional center.
His Ralston is one who acts and does not think. It’s what got him stuck in the first place, and he knows it instantly. But Franco has a way of making his character’s remarkable ingenuity believable without any context of why he can go head to head with Bear Grylls. He proves to us without a moment’s thought that he immediately knew his mistake, but to change his initiative for even a moment would have gotten him killed.
Boyle’s film and its energy speak to this need for action and motivation. It all builds to a touching finale featuring Ralston himself, and it’s a beautifully inspirational feeling amidst all the struggle and agonizing fight it took to get to this point.
I came out of “127 Hours” confident I could do anything, the least of which was to write this review and to tell you to absolutely see it.
4 stars